Sunday, December 31, 2017

Google Hangouts was buggy from the start today so there are three separate broadcasts. But Vivian was here so that makes up for it. Casey lurked in chat.
Today's reading is Parasha Shemot (Exodus 1-6).
I've put the entire chat transcript, which Luke always helpfully includes on his blog, below the fold. Our viewers are very few but sharper still.
I join Luke in the second broadcast.

Today opens with the question: what is the state of the alt right? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Friday, December 29, 2017

Was the abomination that has become of the Catholic Church inevitable due to its celibate order?

Was the abomination that has become of Christianity generally also inevitable due to the preponderance of gay ministers?

My impression is the priesthood and the secular ministry alike attract gay men. Ritual and aesthetic devotion appeal to the same sensibility that produces the gay aesthete. The rites appeal to gay male congregants as well for the same reason. The repressed gay Catholic can sublimate his homosexual desire in a ritual order that has meaning and beauty.

It was inevitable that gay men would come to preponderate (I suspect dominate) not only in the priesthood but in its upper reaches. Behind the scenes there's probably a struggle between a gay and a genuine celibate faction, between competing gay cliques.

But what it can't have is a family faction, of men with children who have the same concerns as their parishioners. The Church has no skin in the game.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Obama rose to prominence and eventually the presidency on the basis of a platitudinous and dishonest speech given at the 2004 Democratic political convention whereupon he, to a joyous reception, declared old America was dead and a new, multicultural but united America had risen in its place. Rapturous Democrats believed against all reason.
Once in office, he forgot all about unity and, as he saw what he could get away with, gradually turned up the demagogy, leaving us with the nightmare of Black Lives Matter and a nation more divided than ever. If Obama's presidency sought "unity" to call it a failure wouldn't be fair--it's more like a con.

The other misconception regarding Obama was the assumption of ability. A sort of premium is added to black achievement. Individually whites eager to prove their anti-racist bona fides gush over the barest signs of brilliance. Organizations needing to avoid discrimination litigation promote second-rate black talent ahead of its worth. It's become a running joke. Neil DeGrasse Tyson becomes "Black Science Man" and Barack Obama's hand-job of a speech becomes "transcendent".

It's otherwise reasonable to assume anyone who reaches the presidency is a high-achieving, high-energy sort, because of what it takes to get there. Barack Obama was propelled to the presidency by forces largely beyond his control (but certainly not his approval). His predecessor was carried along by the institutional corruption of the Republican Party. He was carried along by the cultural corruption of the Democratic Party. Both have demonstrated a successful presidency doesn't depend on competence or energy, but on a compliant media and political parties. Either administration can be seen as very successful politically and very bad overall for the nation, each in its own way.

The individual Obama acolyte is never going to think this. They assume that outside the office he's still this powerful intellect and force, whose motivations and reasons we mortals can only dimly sense.

Those institutions are not capable of withstanding these assaults much longer without cracking. The people in the country know this, or, at the very least, except for the 35 percent who are the real cargo-cultists out there, they sense it deeply in their bones. They feel the deepening acceleration of the spiral. The Democratic Party doesn’t have the power to lead and the Republican Party doesn’t have the will and, even at its best, the media is overmatched by the sheer magnitude of bullshit this administration shovels out as a matter of course every hour of every day. This is absolutely no time for the most eloquent voices in society to be on the bench.

So why, sir? Why in the hell are you out there giving speeches to motherfcking bankers in motherfcking Brazil? As the NYT reports

Because, like the man said, that's where the money is. Such questions!

Obama's post-presidency resembles the social media campaign of a recently spurned lover determined to show how happy and fabulous his life is: here's a photo of me hang-gliding! Here I am hanging out with a billionaire!

...a new $50 coffee table book by former White House photographer Pete Souza, Obama: An Intimate Portrait, is selling so fast the publisher can’t keep up.
“That shows the immediate nostalgia that we have for Barack Obama, given the dramatic contrast between him and his successor,” Updegrove said.

Seeing death approach, Jacob requests to be returned to Canaan to be buried among his own. Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, and his own sons. Typical Old Testament hierarchical division of roles occurs as the Twelve Tribes are created. Jacob is buried at Macphelah (Hebron) where Jewish legend holds he remains today in the Cave of the Patriarchs on land Abraham bought to bury Sarah.
This is the shortest of the Torah portions.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Good evening my fellow Newmericans. Tonight Vice President Tal-Numina Xe-Xir and I begin by acknowledging the Nacotchtank people, upon whose stolen land this capitol stands. We acknowledge the Algonquin people who are the traditional custodians of this land and pay respect to elders past and present of the Algonquin Indian Nation. Nici sigi psach ke-yin,
Dich m'djel mieol wagh nuch

I extend that respect to other Native people present, and for the profound contributions they have made to Newmerica.

We acknowledge the descendants of African slaves...

[broadcast fails for 9 minutes 30 seconds, resumes]

...for the profound contribution of Islam to Newmerica...

[broadcast fails, resumes at 7 minutes 29 seconds]

...for the many injustices suffered by Pacific Islanders in the United States...

[broadcast fails, resumes at 9 minutes]

...by finally harnessing the incredible power of that diversity we'll be able to restore electricity in virtually all of the Eastern Seaboard by the next holiday season.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Google's Eric Schmidt is the latest to fall to the sexual inquisition. It isn't who they're going after now, but what. Guys with anything to be pilfered away by the current frenzy had better not even think about cheating. Sort of takes all the point out of success:

Schmidt is a known womanizer despite being married for 37 years to Wendy Schmidt, who said in 2012 they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece of luggage” following him around the world.

News outlets have been sniffing around Schmidt’s former flames looking for a Harvey Weinstein-like bombshell, a source close to Schmidt told The Post. But sources say there’s nothing there.

“They haven’t found s–t. Because there is no sexual harassment. There has never been any issue. They have had nothing. People have looked into it and people have not found anything,” the source said.

The source added that if something foul was afoot, Google would have canned Schmidt completely.

“Why would they keep him on the board, then have to do this all over again?” the source asked.

Another source close to Schmidt said that any rumors of sexual harassment were “totally not true.”

But the insider could not deny Schmidt’s well-documented romantic past and said the techie’s entanglements were “consensual” and that there are “no complaints” against the exec or “settlements” from the company.

This seems a notable escalation. At this rate I predict someone will go down early in the new year for refusing to give oral sex.

Ironic that it's as if feminism, despite itself, was ultimately all about this: getting that cheating bastard. Feminism is women trying to do what they've always done, regulate sexuality, against the current of the same sexual revolution that spawned it. The sexual revolution is untenable, but no one wants to admit it.

Doubly ironic is the purge's origins, in my opinion at least, in the "pussy hat" movement protesting President Trump as a sexual abuser. I believe it to be a necessary, if not the ultimate, cause of the current hysteria.

Once Harvey Weinstein's brother or other rival leaked the story of his behavior to the media a fire was lit. The pussy hat movement had swept through the culture like Santa Ana winds, turning the landscape to tinder. Weinstein's behavior had long been no secret, after all. There's a reason it took off now, and that reason is Donald Trump. Ashley Judd's just-short of unhinged performance at an anti-Trump rally makes sense now, knowing she was one of Harvey's objects of desire. The actress was channeling big time.

Sadly, men as a group will forever be atoning for men as individuals.

Another thing to remember is the non-hysterical part of the hysteria: for every one of these fellows knocked off his perch there's someone looking to take his place, usually orchestrating it.

It dangled from a branch for days, wrapped with bright ribbons and studded with large nails and oversize safety pins.
It weathered and hardened from gray-black to a leathery brown. From a distance, as professionals and students walked past the tree at the west end of Palmer Square Park to trains and buses each morning, it could have been mistaken for a hanging length of bark. But within 10 feet, it was clearly something else: a footlong tongue.
Why was a tongue, likely a cow’s, so carefully disfigured and displayed near the luxury apartments and condominiums in rapidly gentrifying Logan Square? In a neighborhood that’s now home to loads of 20-something hipsters, it could be an elaborate performance art piece or a joke.
But Logan Square and nearby Humboldt Park have much longer histories as working-class enclaves filled with first- and second-generation immigrants, so another possibility presents itself.
Tongues have long played roles in Afro-Caribbean religions like Santeria. The symbolic engine of speech, a tongue can be used in many such faiths to try to get someone to remain silent, according to Lisa Poirier, an assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University.
“Often it has to do with a court case,” Poirier said. “You can take a tongue and bind it up to get someone to shut up.”

Are Santerians joining the fight against gentrification? Was the tongue just there to get the hipsters to shut up, for maybe five effin minutes, about the latest greatest cable series?
More likely it's a personal dispute involving gossip or snitching. But there's no fun in that.

Such practices flourished for centuries among enslaved populations in North and South America and the Caribbean who didn’t believe police and judges would treat them fairly, Poirier said.
“They had to find these religio-magical ways to bring about the ends they sought,” she said.
“You could put a name on a piece of paper and put it inside the tongue, then seal it in with pins, but you wouldn’t necessarily need to do that,” she said. “You could just have someone’s name in your mind as you dealt with the tongue, bound it up.
“The logic is clear,” she added. “There’s a clear connection between the tongue and speech, and you can find the things you need in an urban setting like Chicago. Cow tongues are easily available.”

I can get you a toe, Dude. I can get you a toe this afternoon.

The clear "logic" is actually homeopathic magic, attempting to influence events or control people through mimicry--here the ritual tying up of the cow tongue ties the tongue of the target by the law of similarity.
Of course, all roads now lead to racial justice, so the stubbornly benighted nature of blacks and browns is--need I say it?--the fault of white laws.

Poirier said that despite the shocking appearance, it’s not that out of the ordinary, even today.
“It’s sort of widespread throughout the Americas,” she said. “It speaks to the fact there are still people who feel they won’t get a fair shake in the justice system.”

It remains to be seen how much more normalization of voodoo and superstition will be necessitated by our new diversity. The expectation that it will wither away over generations, which would have been taken for granted, probably can't be articulated without controversy now. Now the expectation is that we'll bring any new religion or culture into the "mosaic" of American diversity, unaltered and celebrated as Vibrant! Make a little room, Lutheranism, there's another brotherhood of faith here.

The practitioners of voodoo may have magic on their side, but up against real estate equity they haven't a chance. It's only a matter of time. The shocked reaction of suburban Americans to the witch doctors and others displaced by gentrification in their midst will provide plenty of grist for the anti-racism mill--from the same poseurs who displaced the diversitypes in the first place. How dare those losers not tolerate this tradition that's every bit as venerable as any other?

Walking near Palmer Square Park while the tongue was still in place, local resident Marina Goldshteyn noted the area’s shifting demographics.

“I know the neighborhood is changing a lot, but it hasn’t entirely,” she said.
The cow tongue, however, is no more. A Chicago Park District worker noticed the tongue and cut it down earlier this week.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

"Well private collections are a problem, certainly. We have no idea how many are out there. What constitutes a collection, also, is a legitimate question."
Herbert perked up at this.
"Yes. That's my concern. Say a guy has, in the classic example, an old newspaper announcing the moon landing..."
Genero looked at him with sly sympathy.
"Well, if this friend of yours had only that, and just that, while he'd be in clear violation, it's not like they're going to come busting down his door. As long as it doesn't circulate, he's not going to get into trouble."
"But he could be arrested."
"Yes. Of course. Look what they got that last fellow for, what was he, chairman of the national bank or something? It was a stack of old pornographic magazines. It wasn't even political stuff, they were more in the line of curiosities."
"Aren't they all really?"
Herbert asked hopefully.
"No. No. There's still some very dangerous stuff out there. Even the sort of stuff in the chairman's collection, there were to be found political articles expounding the most dangerous ideas. Something of a political nature would be a stew of toxic expression."
"Really?"
Herbert regretted the intrigue in his voice.
Genero continued.
"But I point him out only to note they had some reason to come after him and the collection was a pretext."
"They say everybody possessing any text is in violation."
"Any text older than sixty years, even the most banal. That's in there. But it it's not quite everything."
"And images?"
"Well there's no reason to worry about photographs, paintings or the like yet, of course, but you know President Feltyear He-Him said just the other night, the international direction is clearly toward the gradual cleaning up and elimination..."
"So, with the inclusion of imagery, it might become true that virtually everyone is in violation of the International Convention on Intolerance and Hate Communication?"
"That's an exaggeration. But it isn't such a bad thing. Everyone has something on them. Everyone has a stake in making things work--because everyone is on notice not to screw up or, worse, go over to the wreckers."
"What did he do, anyway?"
"Who?"
"The bank chairman."
"Who cares?"

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

I deleted my Twitter account yesterday, exhausted by the pointlessness of it all. I saw a tweet of mine, something I thought clever, had been retweeted by one of my dozens of followers to his dozens of followers and I was plunged into an oh-so-familiar bout of mediocrity-induced depression. It's not fun to suck. I'm not going to suck anymore--not on Twitter, at least.

I'm not wasting any more time on it. What I'd like to do now is a podcast. Looking for a partner.

I will continue to participate in Torah Talk with Luke Ford of course, until they wise up and throw me out. The idea is to do a short one of my own as well once a week. Two guys talking in a humorous fashion about things.

Last week we talked about Joseph as the prototypical court Jew. His brothers sell him into slavery for his arrogance after he prophesies he'll rule over them, and the very stars in the sky will bow down to him. Hard to blame them too much.

But Joseph comes to Pharaoh's attention after interpreting a pair of his dreams--in the only bible passage I can think of where a non-Hebrew's dreams are brought into the narrative. Because of his superior intelligence Joseph ends up running Egypt for a grateful Pharaoh. He sets about storing Egyptian grain to withstand the seven year famine that he prophesied from Pharaoh's dreams.

His brothers, suffering the same famine in Canaan, come to Egypt to buy grain. They find themselves before Joseph in his capacity as Pharaoh's minister and do not recognize him. After some typically Old Testament subterfuge he reveals himself to them, forgives them and invites them to bring their aged father Jacob (Israel) to Egypt.

In this week's section Joseph presents five of his "weaker" brothers before Pharaoh, instructing them to tell Pharaoh they're shepherds, not traders in livestock. Shepherds are disdained--but they aren't an economic threat. Pharaoh gives them a choice piece of land and tells Joseph to put the capable among them in charge of his livestock. The Jewish elite is developing, having arrived via chain migration.

Joseph has wisely stocked up on grain to withstand the famine, and now he's trading that grain for livestock and other forms of capital--the wealth of the land steadily being transferred into his hands until at last landholders have sold their land to Pharaoh for grain. Egypt is a country of slaves, with a foreign elite at its head. I don't think the Egyptians of the time needed fascism, anti-Semitic tropes or Donald Trump to have felt some gnawing sense of resentment, to say the least.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Feminism rescued woman from her dependence on men. Nevertheless she persisted. She keeps persisting away at depending on men.

Beneath all the noise the ongoing Hollywood sexual harassment scandal documents the present of an age-old practice, women depending on sex to advance in male-dominated fields (and they're all male-dominated).

There is a disparity in power for the women of course. Feminism is an attempt to correct that. Earnest feminists assume the power disparity is yet another trick of the patriarchy, and its elimination won't come at a cost but with a yield: all that female creativity previously denied bursting forth, presumably.

Mostly at this point feminists don't care. All "rights" movements are in the appropriation phase, what Steve Sailer has called the "Scramble for America": each politically favored group scrambling for its fair share of the ruin before the others hog it all up.

But the power disparity in the sex-for-advancement scheme exists for good reason: it's a lot harder for the male to get where he is than the female, who competes in a too-brief window of high value attractiveness against a sea of beautiful eager faces. What the male has to trade is essentially power that translates into a variety of opportunity (including the competing females); the female is trading her intimate self for just a piece of that. The woman who leverages that into her own genuine power is real but rare. More common I'm sure is the young homosexual twink who manages to do so.
Women simply won't tend toward the same aggressive/creative behavior in general that put the guys where they are in the first place.

It's all so depressingly obvious.

The inquisition is ruining it all. Not just for the men, but for the young women who were or would like to be complicit. Hollywood is driving away all those horny creative men that are the backbone of the industry. They are not going to replace them with women, woke transsexuals and gay negroes. Wake the hell up, ladies.

But replacement is precisely the game. The model is that of the university race or rape hoax yielding diversibucks and jobs: X group is deemed offended by Y, only correction for Y is more X.
The only way we're going to solve Hollywood's sexual assault problem is by putting more women in Hollywood. And the opportunities for that look promising--replacing men with women, not "solving" a sexual assault problem, which of course could just get worse.

By forbidding any criticism of the women involved (unless it's the rare case of a powerful woman adopting the male model) feminism seeks to maintain a natural advantage desirable women have always had. But in taking away this opportunity for ambitious men, and in driving so many out of an industry the face of which is already changed, they are squelching a great source of advancement for ambitious young women.

The naive assumption of course is that women will be replacing these men in, say, Hollywood, with no lack of decline in quality or profit--nay, with a certain increase in both.

But the reality is to the extent feminism appropriates Hollywood it weakens it, which, big-picture now, might not be such a bad thing. Because of all the feminism Hollywood puts out.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

My trip to the bank about a month ago was somewhat unusual, and I knew it would require special attention from a teller...I couldn’t believe that this person was the person with whom I was about to interact. What I was seeing was a beautiful woman. She seemed in her mid-twenties, about five feet seven or eight inches tall. She had exquisitely smooth and lustrous brown hair, arresting brown eyes, and a classic movie-star beauty which reminded me of a young Ingrid Bergman. As I was preparing myself to deal with such a stunning specimen of womanhood, I asked myself, “Why is she here? Why is she not working for a modeling agency selling perfume or diamonds?”

I asked this because in my line of work and the circles in which I travel, you don’t often find jaw-droppingly beautiful women who are just standing there waiting for you to come up and talk to them. During our encounter I had to look away from her a few times because I didn’t want it to seem as if I, a happily-married husband and father, were mooning over a girl practically young enough to be my daughter. (The temptation was there, believe me.)

Anyway, she was perfectly nice and professional, and our entire transaction took about ten minutes. I left the bank satisfied that I had completed that errand and was free to run the next one. Yet as I stepped into the parking lot, I experienced a thoroughly unwelcome emotion, one I hadn’t experienced in a long time: heartache. A nice, jarring stab of it, too. And this wasn’t even mature, manly heartache, the kind no one could really blame me for having. No, no, this was a return of the angsty, juvenile heartache that everyone over thirty wants to forget. This was the heartache that plagued countless lonely nights throughout my pretty goddamn pathetic youth. I remember them well.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.I do not think that they will sing to me.

Of course, I never once felt any resentment or anger towards the nice girl at the bank. But I knew she was the cause of this heartache. But how? Why? The answer came to me immediately: she never smiled at me. Not once. For me, she was nothing less than a vision, the epitome of what the human form can attain. For her, however, I was just another customer, deserving of prompt service and common courtesy and nothing more. This beautiful creature couldn’t even spare me a single solitary smile.
Realizing this made me feel so mean.

One thing feminists didn't conjure entirely out of thin air is misogyny. Males experience evolutionary despair (felt as heartache) at being exposed to desirable females who are not available to them.
Young men now are subjected to endless titillation in an environment, for the regular straight white guy at least, that must feel increasingly competitive and hostile, due to the ongoing migration of females into demographic alternatives.

Sexual liberation has only increased the risk of sexual violence for women in an environment saturated with suggestion. At the same time it subjects young men to a sort of protracted torture of sexual teasing.

Male sexual rage is a biological response to losing out in the evolutionary struggle.
It's evolutionary terror, a mortal fear. Just as you fearfully anticipate your own death you fearfully anticipate your genetic line dying off in the next generation. That feeling in your stomach is a physical epiphany.

Quinn sees in his reaction to the beautiful bank teller--a reaction we all know--the motivation for a recent online campaign against Lauren Southern and Tara McCarthy from some of the rougher corners of the alt right. The charges against the women are silly (I thought I saw someone confidently "exposing" her one eighth Indian ancestry somewhere); I read them, even of Ms Southern's swarthy sojourn, which is a shame don't get me wrong, and I think who are these young men going to hell over this?These guys are going to have to toughen up in the future, because their future is toughening up all the time.

One of the charges against the women is that they're overrated, as we'd expect attractive women in a movement with few of them to be. I don't doubt it; I think the praise premium by which men overrate the intelligence of attractive women (about ten IQ points) is exceeded in constancy only by white liberals' same application in favor of blacks (about fifteen).

But even if its true, the women are not overrated in what they bring to the movement in charm and grace. I haven't followed either closely, but as far as I can tell Southern has done some fairly brave reporting in the field and McCarthy's podcast is one of the better ones (I've only recently started paying attention to them).
You need women. It helps if they're attractive. Even if they are overrated they are not really; they bring something to the table no man can. They broaden the appeal of ideas only kept underfoot by being made to look unappealing.

Via Thomas Wictor on Twitter here's a video Seattle Police released regarding an officer-involved shooting.
First we see a confrontation between an apartment manager and a wigger Bonnie and Clyde, presumably the same pair firing at police later. The male's behavior leading up to his shooting appears suicidal, but nothing he's done up to that point makes any sense, so who knows.

No doubt they'll find a pharmaceutical cocktail in this guy's blood, and certainly some of the high-grade marijuana you can buy legally in Washington State now, the excessive use of which has introduced a yet-understood illness characterized by "screaming and nausea". This unfortunate couple represents a new feral class; drugs play a large part in their de-socialization.

But I'm beginning to suspect increased drug use is affecting most aspects of life and classes of people now. CNN's recent screw-up--whether bad reporting or bad hoaxing--was so remarkably inept I found myself wondering, like the old joke, what they were smoking over there. Truly.

In his recent interview with Luke Ford Greg Johnson suggests drug use is endemic in the "alt right" (which he doesn't identify with, despite being a white nationalist) and sees the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally as a drug or alcohol induced disaster.

You can't help but wonder nowadays, when you see something sloppy or just inexplicable.

Anderson Cooper elicited minor controversy with a tweet recently mocking President Trump. I really can't keep up, because I would have thought this relatively mild insult was par for the Trump Resistance course, but apparently this is still out of bounds:

Alcohol and a lack of immediate diversion are usually enough to explain such as this. Cooper said his phone was "hacked" at first, and now is just saying it was "taken" and the tweet posted (as if by no human hand). A mischievous twink was one of my first preferred suspicions, and this explanation strengthens it. Whatever the case, you can be sure drugs had something to do with it all.

Perhaps drugs are shaping our political views--they would have to if their use is broad enough. Would white ethno-masochism be possible without them? Are the kinds of drugs, legal and illegal, we've acquired along the way shaping our collective worldview? Certainly drugs are helping white Americans right now with the indignity and anxiety of dispossession, easing them along.
And that's a downer.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Two of today's missives in the "emotional labor" long-con. Lydia appears to be half black-half Jewish and all lesbian. I think she should give the other two points of her identity triad more credit. Jewish lesbians are probably doing more than their share for justice.

But that's eleven thousand retweets for a patently absurd assertion. Speaking of labor, that's not a bad return on it.

Lydia's likely a little more savvy than her tweet suggests, which makes it all the more objectionable, but I actually believe the sisters when they say stuff like this:

Demagogy effects a disparate impact. No group seems more amenable to it than blacks, for their unique historical place in America and their unique character as a people as expressed at the individual level. Indulging black rage has been a prominent feature of civil rights for half a century (Tom Wolfe published "Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers" in 1970), and for a long time it must have seemed it would subside along with improving conditions and opportunities for blacks.

We've seen the opposite happen. Blacks have not only experienced a profound increase in opportunity (though their not taking advantage of it is disguised as discrimination) they have come to dominate culture and politics (or at least black concerns continue to dominate politics).
Black rage has only increased. It increases in tandem with black confidence and dominance--the election of Barack Obama, of all things, crystallized the present, untenable state of black advocacy.

Black people aren't going to be the ones to put the brakes on this humoring of their every resentful whim. Somebody else is going to have to do it.

Saner heads on the Left need to prevail upon their radicals and, yes, blacks, before things get truly ugly with (more) violence in the streets as a result of left wing racial demagogy.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

A trend in social justice emerged at some point in the heady last days of Obama, introducing the concept of "emotional labor" to social justice, in particular to black advocacy. Emotional labor is the effort one puts into social interaction, particularly regarding having to "fake" it; the smiling waitress, for instance, is laboring to an extent she wouldn't be if she didn't have to smile. The concept originated in 1983 as a class-based concern of progressives. That smiling waitress, domestic workers, immigrants in foreign lands were all enduring greater loads of emotional labor to get by.

As nobody labors more, emotionally, than blacks, I'm surprised it took this long for the idea to find its natural home as a civil rights hustle. But it's here. Explaining racism to white people is exhausting, say black people making a living explaining racism to white people. Enduring racism is literally giving black people high blood pressure, says the New York Times. So it necessarily follows those angry protesters shutting down speeches and entire schools are being unfairly taxed in the fight for justice. They are not being compensated for their emotional labor. Yeah.

Here's an impromptu lecture on the subject in a college square:

The dog must be one of those service pets for the emotionally fragile.

The professor above had collared some of her white colleagues who had managed to escape an impromptu inquisition going on inside--wherein the students who had shut down Evergreen State College were assailing faculty and administration. The white teachers were shirkers. She's tired of her and the other women of color doing all the emotional labor. The logic is sound--if you accept that social justice seeks the common good. Why shouldn't they be pitching in? That's why the white cucks stand there and nod--to disagree would be to question the whole enterprise.

The professor complains of having to "sit there and fucking wax poetic for your benefit about shit"; she gets the game perfectly, if the gormless whites haven't a clue. She's a performer. She's to be paid for her performance.

Meanwhile inside the same refrain:

Love's Labor Cost

The tranny taking a stand in hotpants on behalf of Proud Black Women was leader of the protests and all but took over the school like a Vandal warlord for a couple of days. The media studies professor and diversity board member lambasting her colleagues was another principle in organizing the school takeover, all leveraged off of--what else?--an email sent by a dissenting professor questioning the latest social justice excess.

The professor hasn't been back to school all year, fearing for her safety after online bullying. She won't be getting any emotional reimbursement for her efforts now, but some financially, at least.
She's leaving the school and settling her lawsuit (did I forget to mention the lawsuit? do I need to mention the lawsuit?):

Powers said the resignation was a condition of a settlement Lowe reached with the college. She will receive $240,000, which includes final wages and attorney fees, to settle her tort claim of discrimination and a hostile work environment, according to Powers.

Speaking of money, the school is reeling (no sympathy for its collective emotional labors) since the shutdown, having already impoverished programs to promote diversity (and of course conceding more money to it following the takeover), losing faculty and students.

Bret Weinstein, the progressive biology professor whose offending email made the black kids angry, as they say, and who's no longer at the school as a result, tells the backstory to the shutdown:

In 2015, Evergreen hired a new president. Trained as a sociologist, George Bridges did two things upon arrival. First, he hired an old friend to talk one-on-one to members of our community — faculty, staff, and students. We talked about our values and our visions for the college. But the benefit of hindsight suggests that he was looking for something else. He was mapping us, assessing our differences, our blind spots, and the social tensions that ran beneath the surface. Second, Bridges fired the provost, Michael Zimmerman. The provost, usually synonymous with the vice president for academics, is the chief academic officer at an institution of higher education. Zimmerman would have disapproved of what Bridges had in mind and would have had some power to stop it. But he was replaced by a timid (though well-liked) insider who became a pawn due to his compromised interim status and his desire not to make waves.

Having mapped the faculty and fired the provost, Bridges began reworking the college in earnest. Surprise announcements became the norm as opportunities for discussion dwindled.

We know Bridges as the bow-tied, submissive flak-catcher of the protests. That's a very different fellow described above. I bet that describes a lot of these types.

The president took aim at what made Evergreen unique, such as full-time programs. He fattened the administration, creating expensive vice president positions at an unprecedented rate, while budgets tightened elsewhere due to drops in student enrollment and disappearing state dollars. He went after Evergreen’s unparalleled faculty autonomy, which was essential to the unique teaching done by the best professors.

All of this should have been alarming to a faculty in which professors have traditionally viewed administrative interference in academic matters with great suspicion. But Bridges was strategic and forged an alliance with factions known to be obsessed with race. He draped the “equity” banner around everything he did. Advocating that Evergreen embrace itself as a “College of Social Justice,” he argued that faculty autonomy unjustly puts the focus on teachers rather than students, and that the new VP for Equity and Inclusion would help us serve our underserved populations.

But no discussion was allowed of students who did not meet the narrow criteria of being “underserved.” Because of the wrapping, concerns about policy changes were dismissed as “anti-equity.” What was in the nicely wrapped box turned out to be something else entirely.

The civil rights movement is now pure plunder--ironic that this is one of Ta Nehisi Coates' favorite words. The fury of protesters, the pettiness of their complaints, these are measures of a sort of how deep into the nation's ruin they are. They'll have to work harder and harder to extract less and less from the American legacy, with more and more identities elbowing up to the trough.

Ever more creative monetization schemes will be required for emotional labor and other degradations.

34:40 Someone on the live chat challenges Luke's history and gets the smack-down. Don't fuck with the Luke.

48:50 The difference between Judaism and Christianity.

58:00 Luke on the superiority of the law over conscience.

1:05:05 Will Trump complete the system of German Idealism?

1:06:25 Yes, Trump will complete the system of German Idealism.

1:26:45 "Religious Jews are asked about the Talmud." A viral video wherein Hasidic Jews speak frankly about the Gentiles. We are not flattered.

1:27:20 The virtues of hypocrisy in the world of ethnic warfare.

1:38:00 Wherein we reason our way to the conclusion Judaism is a proposition religion, motivated solely by our concern for the Jews and humanity.

1:42:25 Is Casey cucked on white identity?

1:45: Joseph the archetypal court Jew.

Luke's notes on the show:

This week’s Torah portion tells the story of “Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams, Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, and Joseph’s testing of his brothers.”

* The story of Joseph illustrates why Jews have rarely been popular with non-Jews but have often been useful to gentile rulers. Joseph was the first court Jew. He became second in power to the Pharoah and he took on, to some degree, an Egyptian point of view. He accuses his brothers of being spies. An ethnocentric group is quick to view outsiders as spies. Jews have sometimes accused me of being a spy in my conversion to Judaism. Anglos, being the least ethno-centric group around, are unlikely to view outsiders as spies.

* Joseph did not learn much from his experience. In Gen. 43:34, he gives Benjamin portions five times as large as the portions given to the rest of his brothers.

Luke: “Do you believe in objective morality and objective good and evil?”

Greg: “Yes. I think that morality and good and evil and things like that are based on nature. I follow the classical Greek notion of Natural Law and Natural Right. I believe those are reasonable views, that we can come up with an ethics that is based on nature, that’s not based simply on social convention or simply on revelation and appeals to religion. Science and socio-biology gives us a lot of useful information for constructing this ethic. Larry Arnhart has written a book called Darwinian Natural Rights. He’s influenced by classical political philosophy and natural right thinking and yet he shows that socio-biology supports a lot of the naturalistic ethical ideas that you find in classical Greek and Roman political philosophy. That is the outlook that I think is most promising. By appealing to science and to classical philosophy, we can come up with a moral consensus and political consensus that is reason-based and science-based and that allows us to sidestep inherently contentious and sometimes violence-inducing things like appeals to religious revelation.”

Friday, December 08, 2017

[I posted a crappy edit of this earlier. I've cleaned it up and re-posted it. Sorry]

Steve Sailer's Taki column this week is about Raj Chetty's latest analysis of the vast database of anonymized tax data at his disposal. Chetty's takes the angle, as if to appeal, that America is shortchanging not only the underrepresented but itselfby by leaving all that Potential of Color out there undeveloped. Sailer:

Should white men be blamed or thanked for inventing most of the technology that makes our lives better? A new study by Stanford economist Raj Chetty exploiting his unique access to your old 1040 tax returns argues that the massive gaps in inventiveness (as measured by patents) seen among the races, the sexes, and the regions of the country represent a tragic case of what he calls “Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing”:

Whites are more than three times as likely to become inventors as blacks. And 82% of 40-year-old inventors today are men.

Chetty says, based on his study of 452 patent holders who were New York City public school students and for whom he has third-grade test scores:

High-scoring black kids and Hispanic kids go into innovation at incredibly low rates…. There must be many “lost Einsteins” in those groups—children who appear to have been similarly able at a young age to their white and Asian peers but who never got a chance to deploy their skills. ["a mind is a terrible thing to waste"]

Chetty writes: A lack of exposure to innovation can help explain why high-ability children in low-income families, minorities, and women are significantly less likely to become inventors. Importantly, such lack of exposure screens out not just marginal inventors but the “Einsteins” who produce innovations that have the greatest impacts on society.

Chetty is a real scientist but still evinces the obliviousness of a new class spawned by America's new diversity: the high-IQ, no-clue Southeast Asian newly arrived in the West, or marinated in its self-abasement in its schools, taking up political correctness and lecturing us with a the sort of confidence that comes from complete ignorance.

By the way, it’s unclear why Chetty’s study of inventors is entitled “Lost Einsteins” rather than “Lost Edisons."

Chetty, who sometimes seems not all that familiar with his adoptive country, appears to have gotten the European scientific theorist Albert Einstein (who, although he once worked in a patent office, was not much of an inventor) confused with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (whose name is on 1,093 U.S. patents).

Einstein, Edison…they both begin with “E.” Chetty lectures:

In particular, targeting exposure programs to women, minorities, and children from low-income families who excel in math and science at early ages (e.g., as measured by performance on standardized tests) is likely to maximize their impacts on innovation. The Indian immigrant doesn’t seem all that aware that encouraging blacks (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hispanics) as well as girls to study science and engineering has been an enormous social priority for the past half century.

Operating from the assumptions of disparate impact--that any disparity (favoring the majority) in achievement is a measure of discrimination, because there can be no disparities in God-given abilities between groups--Chetty purports to reveal a vast reserve of black and brown talent going underutilized, impoverishing the nation. He appeals not to our morality but to our practicality: equality is a material resource of a sort. But like Steve points out, finding and promoting that talent out of political and social concern has been one of the central projects of the United States for longer than Mr Chetty has been alive.

But there's an even bigger problem--somehow--for Chetty's assertion. Discrimination of the sort he imagines could not be maintained in our economy--eventually someone is going to go out there and hire all those talented blacks and browns for less and out-compete their self-hobbling discriminatory competitors. The notion is a non-starter.

The fact is employers are discriminating against blacks, for one group, when they facilitate unskilled immigration, looking for pliable and cheap workers from south of the border so they don't have to deal with, prominently among American groups, blacks.

"Underutilization" as a rhetorical argument was innovated in the early sixties in promoting the EEOC. Following the logic of disparate impact (not yet a term) the undeniable effect of racial discrimination in a population where talent is evenly distributed is a massive mis-allocation of resources.

Already it was argued explicitly that disparities measure discrimination. We still labor under that misconception, contrived out of political necessity after discrimination law revealed itself unlikely to produce equality of results:

In the newly evolving view of institutional racism, individual intent was at best a secondary consideration. Instead, employment discrimination should be defined and attacked as a differential [disparate impact], rather than...as an act of prejudice. It's measure was simply the gap between the white and minority rates. This presumptive new definition in turn rested on an implicit normative theory of proportional representation absent that institutional racism had built into the workplace, absent the discrimination that institutional racism had built into the employment structure...It's chief political strength lay in its practical utility as an implicit and self-justifying formula for equity. This was captured in the workaday concept known as "underutilization," a term...accepted as early as 1961. [bold added]

The concept was introduced out of impatience. Anti-discrimination law was not yielding results in achieving proportional representation--which was the whole point, despite the focus on discrimination as an objective wrong.

By the early 1960s...liberal reformers were beginning to question the FEP [Fair Employment Practice] model...Rutgers law professor Alfred W. Blumrosen studied...New Jersey's Civil Rights Commision...a "plaintiff's lawyer" who would spend a sabbatical year in 1965-66 helping the new EEOC organize its enforcement procedures...he brought to his study a "tough minded" model of "maximum enforcement,"...a mental image, a model of how the state agency should operate in order to have maximum impact...Blumrosen concluded...the...commission's enforcement patterns "typified administrative caution...[i]t was a failure.".

When an honest academic studied Massachusetts' enforcement of anti-discrimination law the results could not have been encouraging

Blumrosen's aggressive advocacy in a law review article still did not constitute an objective and comprehensive state study. But Leon Mayhew's Harvard dissertation in sociology did...his dissertation analyzed...the FEP commission in Massachusetts...it concentrated on the years since 1959...it focused more on the complexities of institutional processes than the efficacy of results...

Not that it would have mattered to Blumrosen, but the liberal go-getters of the civil rights movement were getting their first real introduction to black America. I won't say they were just getting to know black America, because they still haven't started that.

Mayhew...was sympathetic to the purpose of the FEP commisions...but unlike Hill [another pit-bull activist government lawyer], Mayhew was bound by the canons of scholarship enforced by a dissertation committee...he closely followed the processing of 118 complaint cases. The pattern he found was surprising. The evidence showed that "complaints developed by individuals whose structural position provides limited perspective are objectively poor...they tend to be based on mere suspicion, they are quite likely to eventuate in a finding of 'no probable cause,' and they tend to be made against firms that do not discriminate"

By 1966 the still-green EEOC had adopted disparate impact as the ultimate criterion, under pressure from feminists as well as the civil rights movement.

...the EEOC had inadvertently accelerated the social and political momentum of the civil rights movement toward a result-centered strategy that would equate race and sex in EEO enforcement. The new strategy would seek to determine the extent of both race and gender discrimination, and potentially the extent of any other categories of alleged discrimination, not by attempting to ascertain intent on a case-by-case basis, but rather by broadly applying a proportional model of statistical representation in the workforce.

...an opposing theory was pushed by the Nixon administration...based on an implicit theory of group rather than individual rights. Its core model was one of proportional representation of racial and ethnic groups, and it emphasized substantive rather than procedural equality. By the end of the Johnson administration the proportional or equal-results model was coming to dominate the enforcement strategies of the EEOC...the Nixon administration in its first year revived the moribund Philadelphia Plan...When...Congress reacted in dismay that autumn by trying to strip away the Plan's provision for job quotas, the Nixon administration hurled the full force of its lobbying muscle against them.

By the Carter administration affirmative action was in effect as a "temporary" expedient in public pronouncements that was quickly (and more or less deliberately) morphing into an institution.

That same year [1977] Justice Blackmun in Weber agreed that quotas wer
"a temporary tool for remedying past discrimination without attempting to 'maintain' a previously achieved balance." Yet despite these disclaimers from the highest authorities, everything we know about the normal politics of social regulation points in the opposite direction. In pluralist America, interest groups have historically entrenched themselves in the political infrastructure in defense of their claimed rights and entitlements.

Indeed. Groups like, say, Southeast Asians, entitled to entrench themselves in the political infrastructure, claiming their right to explain America to us.

Wednesday, December 06, 2017

Fairy tales and domesticity are anathema to feminism. Indeed, the former's just propaganda for the oppression of the latter. Girls naturally prefer the rigors of astronauts and executives to the luxuries of princesses or the sanctuary of the home.

The image of the princess in Western culture looks a lot like the expression of an evolutionary impulse: the ultimate realization of womanhood by bagging the single most desirable male in the gene pool and retiring to a life of ease, wealth and family.

That young women might desire this is unfathomable to feminism. Like the rest of patriarchy, it's a trick the guys played on the women at some point, from which we've yet to recover. Yet somehow women remain far more interested in the British royal family, particularly in women marrying into it, than men.

Naturally female writers adapt their princess fantasies to feminist language. Meghan Markle--black, feminist, black--gives them cover to indulge their fascination.
At least that's what I think after reading this post in the Daily Beast by a female senior editor.

Activist with a decades-long track record of advocating for women and girls. Coupled with one of the most visible and desirable men in the world. Designers want to dress her. Adoring crowds gather to catch a glimpse of her. A woman for kids to look up to, settling comfortably into her role as pleasant figurehead on the world stage. These are things that Ivanka Trump wants to be. These are things Meghan Markle actually is.

How dare Ivanka claim to be the princess!

Ivanka wanted to be a princess, a denizen of photo-ops and collectible dishes Middle America can order from Parade magazine, like Princess Diana. A person beloved and celebrated like royalty, and immune to the critical eye of the political media. Problem is, there’s no “princess” position in the executive branch.

And, alas, none at the Daily Beast. Women here work for a living I tell you. Like Ms Markle, whose decades of achievement will eventually become legend:

Markle first publicly advocated for women and girls when she was just 11 years old, when she started a letter-writing campaign against an ad that suggested only women perform housework. The campaign got the attention of NickNews. Per the AFP, her role as a global ambassador for World Vision Canada took her to Rwanda and fostered her advocacy for children in other developing countries. She’s written about global stigma around menstruation, and spoken at the UN for International Women’s Day in 2015. During that talk, the self-described feminist said “Women need a seat at the table, they need an invitation to be seated there, and in some cases, where this is not available, they need to create their own table.”

Ivanka as the failed feminist doesn't get to be princess. Markle has put in her time. Like in Beauty and the Beast she's rewarded for loving the homely face of feminism with the handsome prince of domestic luxury.

In contrast [to dowdy old Ivanka], Markle is the fashion industry’s newest muse, in much the same way the Middleton sisters were nearly seven years ago. According, again, to the Times’ Vanessa Friedman, Marklemania has already started. Every outfit she wears inspires crazed levels of imitation. Magazines are already using Markle as a peg in style headlines. The coat she wore during her official engagement announcement crashed its brand’s website. Markle, Friedman notes, will “unquestionably be the most desired guest for any brand” at London Fashion Week this winter.

Every day features a new Markle wedding dress fanfic piece written with the help of a bevy of designers and speculation. Will she pick Jenny Packham? Oscar de la Renta? She’s already described her perfect dress, says ABC (she actually didn’t describe anything specific at all). Whatever Markle picks, people will go apeshit over it.

"Whatever it is"? You mean, if she walks naked, like a royal figure in a familiar fairy tale, people will enthuse nonetheless?

There’s something uniquely 2017 fever-dreamy about the divergence of Ivanka and Markle’s fates. Markle, a working actress who once held a briefcase on Deal Or No Deal, gets to retire from the thornier parts of politics and into a life of a princess. Meanwhile Ivanka, the telegenic heiress of the man behind The Art of the Deal has found herself queen of the frogs.

Not "fever-dreamy", just dreamy. One little girl's dream, like every girl's dream, to be whisked away...

Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Over at
Steve Sailer's comment section someone suggested the present sexual inquisition began not with Harvey Weinstein but with Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and "the host of the Five", and I don't know what's worse, knowing who the "host of the Five" is or not. Maybe that's why he goes unnamed. I responded.

The comparison is lame.
Weinstein’s scandal launched the present inquisition overnight, whereas those other guys–political figures always at such risk–all fell in typical if spectacular fashion.

As a putatively non-political but powerful figure, Weinstein enjoyed as we see a much higher degree of license, despite the open secret of his behavior and his connection to the Clintons. They’re reporting today about warnings HRC’s campaign received regarding Weinstein, with Lena Dunham claiming to have told them he’s a “rapist.”

Weinstein’s transitioning into politics would be expected to raise this risk for him. Dunham and others were operating on this reasonable assumption. Having a cable news network at his disposal didn’t save Ailes, but Harvey had the Clintons. More importantly he had a movie studio.

So the guy who’s been getting away with murder all of a sudden goes down and the damn bursts, sexual offense is redefined and broadened, applied retroactively and sparing no one.

The original take-down of Weinstein may have happened simply because his rival/brother saw he was weak after studio revenue started falling off (and Hillary lost the election) and struck. Now this thing is out of anyone’s control.

I’m less interested in why Weinstein now than why the sexual inquisition now, only after Weinstein. Have we simply reached a tipping point? Or, were women primed for it by the “pussy hat” hysterics in response to Trump? I don’t see how they could not have been. Still, O’Reilly and Ailes went down as one-offs. And Harvey sparked a conflagration. Maybe it’s just because Hollywood is the more combustible part of the media, as his antics and energy demonstrate. He went down in the middle of that and it wasn’t very far to the next randy abuser or patsy as the case may be.

And, Hollywood being Hollywood, for nearly every one of these charges there’s a play at work, someone settling a score or someone being taken down. The rules changed overnight and all of these people are armed with bludgeon. Further there’s the encouraging effect of all those examples. Once it gets going and women see they don’t have anything to fear and maybe something to gain (aside from whether or not their charges are genuine) it feeds on itself.

Once Weinstein fell it was as if an ogre had been toppled. They must’ve thought this guy invincible (including Hillary). There’s a “look, it bleeds” aspect to the reaction, cowed people suddenly liberated and running rampant.

That needed to happen in Hollywood, and for it to happen Trump had to happen–specifically, the epic own goal that is the “pussy hat” movement in reaction to–what?–Trump’s tape revealing the depravity and sexual license of show business.

Monday, December 04, 2017

I opened the front door to the cool slick fall night and the cat raced past my feet. Normally he'd rise, languidly stretch and walk inside with feline nonchalance.

I looked one way then the other, saw nothing, closed the door. Moments later I notice the bird he's brought inside--for some reason he's abandoned it for the moment on the floor. It's a sparrow. Do they come out at night? He's on his back and gasping for air. I'm conflicted, if mildly--proud of the old cat's hunting prowess and sorry for the bird.

You can go your whole life without confronting death face to face, as it were, in the modern world. I wonder if this makes it harder or easier when you at last have to face it. I'll probably find out myself. I've grown old never having seen a corpse outside of a coffin.

Wearing a plastic bag like a glove I picked him up as gently as I could. He didn't move. I took him outside and laid him down, squeezing the air out of the bag slowly until I was holding him there in between my palms. Now what to do with him?

Putting him in the garbage wouldn't do so I took him out back. There's a creek there, just over a picket fence in a ravine, indicated in the deep dark only by its sound. Throwing him into the creek seemed a respectful enough means. I was compelled by some slight God-is-watching sense of guilt to make a show of it. Also vanity, somehow, as always, the sense that everyone is watching that never goes away if you're me. I'm not sure these are two different things.

He was still warm. I couldn't bury a warm body. What if he's still alive? He seemed to get warmer in fact; does body heat surge as the life passes out? I would wait. If there's some tiny bit of sentience there, of suffering, then perhaps this ameliorates it. You won't die alone I thought, holding this bird that was likely already dead as a boot.

He took his time. I was in a shadow of black between the house and a massive evergreen that emerges improbably from the middle of the little creek. The half-moon and stars appeared three dimensional behind the flat screen of the skeletal bare branches of an oak tree.
I wavered. It's a bird. This is ridiculous, I know it is. But I'm looking for profundity wherever I can find it. I'm also looking for something else. What?

Sunday, December 03, 2017

Donald Trump retweeted three video clips of anti-white Muslim aggression, without comment. Instantly the news cycle was convulsed. Trump's tweets course through the neural pathways of the system like dopamine.

The outrage seized on the source, a British woman facing jail for speaking against Muslim immigration. Guilt by association always helps to distract from substance. And of what is she guilty? Stuff like the offending tweets, I imagine.

As for the substance of those tweets, there's always the obscurantist option

Glenn Greenwald might be slipping into millennial-speak when he issues the nonsensical phrase "random Muslims", but it helps his argument still. He means presumably random acts by Muslims, but there's nothing random about patterns. These videos are documentary proof of a pattern. They only reach us through the interference of Glenn and his ilk.

(I'm reminded of something I witnessed a few years back. A newly assigned New York Times reporter working in Palestine wrote of her impressions of Palestinians mourning for those killed by Israeli troops. The funerals were outpourings of intense lamentations, but after and beyond that the deaths were taken with a stoicism this western, Jewish woman did not recognize.
The implications were clear, if not to her. A cyber-posse rode out, Glenn and others, I think all Jewish, and she was publicly chastised for the racism of suggesting even a cultural difference between Jews and Palestinians. She quickly pleaded ignorance and apologized. Her impressions were mistaken, coercion made clear to her now.
After this satisfactory conclusion Greenwald observed approvingly "this is how it's supposed to work." What "it" is exactly he didn't say, but I don't think it's journalism.)

It is surreal: the Anglo-descended president of the United States roundly denounced by the West's respectable class for documenting foreigners attacking and humiliating westerners in their home countries. With the vast pozzed middle acquiescing or supporting them. One British luminary promised Trump would be met with massive protests if he dared visit, and he's to be believed. A vast, motley horde is at the globalists' command.

"Delete your account" British pols literally demanded, without the customary humor. Indeed, ashen is the only way I can describe the pallor of one horrified luminary who suggested Trump be charged with hate crimes. The elite appears terrified. Trump's actions are unfathomable.

Trump's re-tweets constitute a revolutionary act.

As much as it's rustled the gilded jimmies of our degenerate elite, it may--it has to, one thinks--be giving hope to indigenous British caught between a hostile government and hostile Muslims.

Trump's intrusion into British domestic politics subverts and betrays the global elite, talking past them to the white populations they loathe and fear. It's astounding that it's happening, and that it needs to in the first place.

The progressive order is global, and by its very nature. Opposition tends to be local, by its very nature. Beyond the harried and harassed of the alt right there is no global opposition. Trump may have changed all that. Just the--forgive the phrase--raised consciousness of it could be transformative.

What a global alt right would look like is anyone's guess. But just the idea of it, widely held, has the potential to accelerate a showdown with the global elite that seems better coming sooner rather than later.

Ross Douthat called Candidate Trump a "traitor to his class" for his economic nationalism. Now he's a traitor to his time, the Current Year. As for the Brit-pol suggesting Trump could be charged under the same laws as the woman he retweeted, the law is the law. The president isn't above the law in his home. Why should he be above Britain's laws? US citizens have been denied visas for political views. Why not the president?

Leonid Bershidsky is a Jewish Russian expatriate journalist who writes opinion for Bloomberg. Here he makes a show of leaving Russia in 2014, citing Putin's press restrictions and the annexation of Crimea. He's spent a career in Russian media for a western audience, working for such as the Moscow Times.

Tony Hovater, the Ohio man whose profile in The New York Times caused much indignation last weekend, would have been in jail or at least under close police surveillance if he lived in Germany. In the U.S., Hovater is free to keep posting swastika-filled pictures on Facebook — but the writer and editors who published a piece about him that was bleakly neutral in tone face ferocious anger for "normalizing" the Nazi sympathizer.

A certain part of U.S. society's desire to set rules has been frustrated by the election of Donald Trump as president — though, in fact, it was frustrated even earlier, by years of Republican majorities in Congress. That frustration is manifesting itself as vocal outrage campaigns on the same social networks that have enabled Trump supporters to organize and white supremacists to find like-minded people in other parts of the country. But rather than bring change, the outrage will deepen rifts.

Everyone who's anyone is angry the Nazi in the story is so nice and harmless--but they would be untroubled in Europe, where he would be thrown in jail for dissent no matter how decent. Bershidsky has the profile of the soulless international bug man, and this piece on its face is a common enough type: an author implicitly suggesting a radical solution in ostensible neutrality. But he goes so far I'm tempted to think it a disguised satire or something. If Bershidsky was alt right, a conspiracy theory of his working for the Deep State to make the movement look ridiculous.

After 1945, Germany chose to pass laws that made most radical right propaganda, as well as Nazi symbols, illegal. These laws are still in force. The Constitutional Protection Office watches people who tend to cut it too close. A tourist who throws a Nazi salute in jest can get arrested. It's not just swastikas that are banned — schools routinely forbid the wearing the clothes of certain brands that are associated with the neo-Nazi movement. Hate speech against groups of people, including races, is a crime. A vast majority of Germans approves of these rules. Those who don't — such as members of the far-right NPD party or the most radical elements within the milder Alternative for Germany party — keep quiet about it or run legal risks. Other countries without Germany's history of Nazi rule — such as Sweden and Switzerland — have also legislated against Nazi symbols.

The standard social-media outrage campaign that quickly brought the NYT to heel is nonetheless waged over media that allows "Trump supporters to organize" and frees "white supremacists" from their isolation. The implied argument here is that social media may have to be sacrificed to social justice. The Left isn't winning there, but, as the author realizes, the Left was winning before social media's democratic revolution messed up the program. Social media is a front and fight the powerful don't need because they run everything outside of it.

I expect nostalgia to kick in eventually, for those simpler times.

A citizen who doesn't break the law is protected by society as a whole, however immoral his actions. It isn't writing about Hovater that "normalizes" his behavior; it's the lack of legal consequences when he embraces Nazi symbolism. Trump's election, Hovater told New York Times writer Richard Fausset, helped drive that home. He now brushes off attacks with "Yeah, so?"

That's a mess of a paragraph. I'm not sure how Trump's election freed Hovater from thinking about criminal sanction. It's social sanction that has been lifted, slightly, for those with less to risk. What he seems to be getting at here is that social sanction doesn't cut it anymore, so criminal sanction may be our only recourse. That and not criminalizing a thing is "normalizing" it.

All the outrage campaigns against "normalizing" white nationalism and sexual harassment, two sins of which Trump has been accused, might seem like a call for legislative change. But there is no serious movement for German-style hate speech laws or Nazi symbol bans making their way through Congress. There are no proposals to match this year's German law that requires social networks to remove hate speech or face steep fines.

But there's no support for that here. The noise of these daily controversies is just that for the most part. So far the Left hasn't had to give up its own freedom of expression to silence opposition for the most part, having the socials under their control and applying unashamedly biased policies. But that only goes so far. The Left is losing the Battle of Social Media and may have to call a bomb strike on their own position.

They might not have had to do that if Hillary Clinton had won.

“Research shows that the dynamic that leads to outrage is not the same as that which effects change,” says Ronny Patz, a nongovernmental organization researcher at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University. “When such waves, such scandals come into focus, it helps when there’s already a process afoot that matches the outrage.” He means a legislative process, and he's right. In response to the criticism of Fausset's piece, The New York Times felt compelled to issue a deftly worded nonapology and to remove from the piece a link to a website selling swastika armbands. But it's a long way from this kind of damage control to real, lasting change.

Such change would require going through the normal political process: drafting legislation, pushing it through Congress and getting it signed by the president, or overriding his veto. In the U.S., of course, the Supreme Court could also legislate outside this process, as it effectively did with gay marriage — something that wouldn't work in European countries, where referendums and parliamentary majorities have made the decision.

We have here a chilling vision of what might have been. Hillary Clinton and her Supreme Court instituting controls on speech and media, with a punitive vengeance for our defiance in bringing forth Trump.

Friday, December 01, 2017

The student newspaper at Evergreen State College has a section in its opinion pages described as “for people of color by people of color.”
“This should be a place where we can be us without it being overshadowed by the dark cloud that is living under white supremacy and having to see things from a white perspective. This is why when we do cover these issues it will be in the context and from the perspective of POC and POC only,” according to the section’s editors as they reintroduced it to readers in September.
The anonymous column, known as “POC Talk,” debuted in the bi-weekly Cooper Point Journal last year and returned this fall to the newspaper’s pages following racial unrest that erupted at the public university this past spring.

“Dear White people, please take a step back, this isn’t brown-people-answer-white-people’s-questions-hour, we’re asking specifically for submissions from POC,” the section’s editors added in their September intro. “As being told no seems to be a difficult concept for some of y’all I await your emails about the Irish, how the term white fragility is mean (great example of white fragility) and how we need to view people through a color-blind lens (just lol). You will 100% not get a response!!!”\

Published in the Journal’s Letters Opinion section, POC Talk says it provides “no-holds-barred commentary on local happenings.” In the inaugural POC Talk column, it was suggested that a subject touched on in the column could possibly include “how do I rid myself of white-dread [sic] roommate’s numerous micro-agressions.”
Topics the column has discussed include student activism, self care, the local comedy scene as well as the turmoil that upended the college after students in May accused a white biology professor, Bret Weinstein, and the university of perpetuating racism.

The Cooper Point Journal did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the column.

This is the same Evergreen College that was being patrolled by a band of lesbians led by a black alpha trannie, all armed with baseball bats, after having shut the school down over some minor offense to their collective pride. Say what you will about the Left, it has the most colorful riff raff. Rightwingers are just embarrassing in comparison.

These guys remind me of Orson Welles' kinky Tijuana street gang in A Touch of Evil. That group featured fifties rock and rollers, a bull dyke and a middle-aged tio with a bad toupee. There is a musical inl'affaire Weinstein if only we can find some gays with both the inclination and willingness to strike this close to their own home.

But home is the thing. Are the kids of color and woe entirely full of it when they lament their status and experience at American universities?

If you leave out the Theory, if you apply the working assumption that rationalization of personal interests is being expressed, however clumsily, by largely self-deluded, immature and mostly unintelligent people who are nonetheless struggling with genuine and powerful emotions--emotions continually aroused by indoctrination--you find something at least honest at the base of it all. And that is the feeling on the part of these kids that they don't "belong" in an academic environment, that they can't compete and that its demands are oppressive.

These things are all true. The university is, perhaps, a microcosm of the minority experience in America, with a particular intensity due to the "white" nature of the university--a white invention. There are two ways minority students can feel alienated from this environment, closely related: they are either incapable scholastically because of affirmative action, or the totality of the environment is oppressive and foreign. As oppressive and foreign as the 'hood would be to the sort of white scholar who thrives in this environment. Because it was literally made for him.

Of course that is changing, by a deliberate process punctuated by the occasional violent whim of students and faculty.

That's what so much of the racial strife is really about right now. People want to fashion the world to conform to their personal and group desires. Black people have made an awful lot of progress, using musical and athletic ability, to shape America in their image. Jews--unashamed of their ethnicity, unlike their WASP counterparts--determine the way we think, laugh and, largely, act.

There is a difference. Jews don't feel the need to lobby for "safe spaces". They simply create them. One could say they're making of the West one giant safe space for the Jews. Blacks, proud as only they can be of their cultural influence, wage culture as ethnic warfare to great effect. But the same suite of stereotypical traits that make black culture seductive ensure blacks will never master the political or social realms to improve their position. But they have managed to change us. The average pozzed normie is a second-rate black person (or Jew) culturally. The first he accepts like a cuck, the second he isn't even aware of.

Sometimes I think a lot of this is payback. Someone like Philip Roth is perpetually offended by the foreign nature of his world. Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man transcended the black genre as a tale of the alienation of the man living in an alien and hostile culture. Now it's you're turn, Whitey (Goyim).

Having had the "racism" wrung out of us we can barely conceive the thought, much less the language, to consider the possibility that our world is increasingly ill-suited to the individual white because it isn't his. He laughs at crude black humor because everyone else does. He pretends to "get" thoroughly Jewish stories and themes. Life for him--us--is one long bad evening nodding along to the ramblings of a boor.

He isn't alone: no individual is suited to a society without a single ethnic and cultural core. Indeed, is there any "society" left in such a society?

The peace of mind of genetic and cultural affinity the minority member must seek in the minority community.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

I speculated yesterday whether Geraldo would fall to the current sexual inquisition for his defense of Matt Lauer, and today Bette Midler, at least, says he should, for an act that was "unseemly" in 1991 (relating a story from the Seventies) and is now a hanging offense.

But most notable is Midler's referencing the Lauer defense. This is what he's being punished for; the transgression is cashed in like a chip in the Narrative casino.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I feel like this video was a gift from the universe to me. Geraldo may have apologized for his tweets supporting Matt Lauer, but he has yet to apologize for this. #MeToopic.twitter.com/TkcolFWfA2

I find it difficult to dislike Bette Midler even when she tries. But watching this one has to be struck by the decline in the quality of female celebrities. Even Barbra Walters comes across better than I remember. What happened to genuinely tough (and funny) broads? That's when women were women.

Older boomers who were adults in the Seventies are compromised as a class by this sudden sexual inquisition. Geraldo wrote a whole book boasting of his sexual escapades. So many out there remain vulnerable, the white ones already undergoing a sort of racial inquisition, with which this one blends seamlessly. The treadmill of white celebrity must be a harrowing experience at the moment. The New Cruelty isn't impressed.

Midler's cavalier attitude about Geraldo's act at the time--and, if true, it is disgraceful--and her bringing it up now reminds me of an earlier celebrity revelation's journey. MacKenzie Phillips, daughter of Michelle Phillips of sixties folk rock act The Mamas and the Papas, who was in a Seventies sitcom before becoming known as a troubled ex-celebrity and, she asserts, incest survivor, told a story on Howard Stern's radio program in the Nineties (I heard it; can't find it) about how, on her eighteenth birthday, she was maneuvered into a room by Mick Jagger, who closed the door behind him and said "I've been waiting for this for years."

She went on to say they spent the night together and it was "pretty terrific." Her attitude was casual and humorous, someone in recovery boasting of an escapade on the path of excess.

Fast forward to years later and Phillips is promoting her book. I see a clip of her on Oprah. She's wiping tears away and saying "...and then he said 'I've been waiting for this for years'..."